Tag: climate

At the Governor’s Legislative and Executive Workgroup public hearing on Wednesday night, two ambassadors for climate justice walked up to the front of a standing room only crowd of 500 people and many elected leaders, to speak up for future generations on the climate emergency.

The Governor sat at a raised table only a few feet away, so we know he heard them loud and clear. It was a special opportunity to address the leaders who will formulate Washington State’s first climate action plan to meet our emissions targets.

But it was a special night for Zoe and Stella too, a school night. As she and her sister were leaving the building Zoe realized she had an essay due the following day. She joked that she would need a note from the Governor. Just at that moment, Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn walked up the stairs. Stella walked right up and said, “Excuse me sir, my big sister needs a note for her teacher because she gave a speech on climate change for the Governor tonight. So she won’t get her homework finished in time.” To his credit, Mayor McGinn, a father, replied, “Who’s got paper?”

Speaking of writing notes, you can write your note to the EPA on tough climate protections against coal power plant emissions.

p.s. The Mayor’s note worked. Zoe got her homework turned in with a one-day extension. Thanks to Mayor McGinn and Governor Inslee for being climate heroes!

Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Scientific instruments showed that the gas had reached an average daily level above 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.

Virtually every automobile ride, every plane trip and, in most places, every flip of a light switch adds carbon dioxide to the air, and relatively little money is being spent to find and deploy alternative technologies.

China is now the largest emitter, but Americans have been consuming fossil fuels extensively for far longer, and experts say the United States is more responsible than any other nation for the high level.

The new measurement came from analyzers atop Mauna Loa, the volcano on the big island of Hawaii that has long been ground zero for monitoring the worldwide trend on carbon dioxide, or CO2. Devices there sample clean, crisp air that has blown thousands of miles across the Pacific Ocean, producing a record of rising carbon dioxide levels that has been closely tracked for half a century.

Carbon dioxide above 400 parts per million was first seen in the Arctic last year, and had also spiked above that level in hourly readings at Mauna Loa.

But the average reading for an entire day surpassed that level at Mauna Loa for the first time in the 24 hours that ended at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday. The two monitoring programs use slightly different protocols; NOAA reported an average for the period of 400.03 parts per million, while Scripps reported 400.08.

Carbon dioxide rises and falls on a seasonal cycle, and the level will dip below 400 this summer as leaf growth in the Northern Hemisphere pulls about 10 billion tons of carbon out of the air. But experts say that will be a brief reprieve — the moment is approaching when no measurement of the ambient air anywhere on earth, in any season, will produce a reading below 400.

“It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” said Maureen E. Raymo, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a unit of Columbia University.

From studying air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice, scientists know that going back 800,000 years, the carbon dioxide level oscillated in a tight band, from about 180 parts per million in the depths of ice ages to about 280 during the warm periods between. The evidence shows that global temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked.

For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future.

Indirect measurements suggest that the last time the carbon dioxide level was this high was at least three million years ago, during an epoch called the Pliocene. Geological research shows that the climate then was far warmer than today, the world’s ice caps were smaller, and the sea level might have been as much as 60 or 80 feet higher.

Experts fear that humanity may be precipitating a return to such conditions — except this time, billions of people are in harm’s way.

Dr. Keeling’s father, Charles David Keeling, began carbon dioxide measurements on Mauna Loa and at other locations in the late 1950s. The elder Dr. Keeling found a level in the air then of about 315 parts per million — meaning that if a person had filled a million quart jars with air, about 315 quart jars of carbon dioxide would have been mixed in.

His analysis revealed a relentless, long-term increase superimposed on the seasonal cycle, a trend that was dubbed the Keeling Curve.

Countries have adopted an official target to limit the damage from global warming, with 450 parts per million seen as the maximum level compatible with that goal. “Unless things slow down, we’ll probably get there in well under 25 years,” Ralph Keeling said.

Yet many countries, including China and the United States, have refused to adopt binding national targets. Scientists say that unless far greater efforts are made soon, the goal of limiting the warming will become impossible without severe economic disruption.

“If you start turning the Titanic long before you hit the iceberg, you can go clear without even spilling a drink of a passenger on deck,” said Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “If you wait until you’re really close, spilling a lot of drinks is the best you can hope for.”

Climate-change contrarians, who have little scientific credibility but are politically influential in Washington, point out that carbon dioxide represents only a tiny fraction of the air — as of Thursday’s reading, exactly 0.04 percent. “The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic,” a Republican congressman from California, Dana Rohrabacher, said in a Congressional hearing several years ago.

But climate scientists reject that argument, saying it is like claiming that a tiny bit of arsenic or cobra venom cannot have much effect. Research shows that even at such low levels, carbon dioxide is potent at trapping heat near the surface of the earth.

“If you’re looking to stave off climate perturbations that I don’t believe our culture is ready to adapt to, then significant reductions in CO2 emissions have to occur right away,” said Mark Pagani, a Yale geochemist who studies climates of the past. “I feel like the time to do something was yesterday.”

In ‘March Toward Disaster,’ World Hits 400 PPM Milestone

Levels of atmospheric CO2 have never been this high in human history; will ‘rise in carbon be matched by rise in climate activism’? – Andrea Germanos, Common Dreams

We did it, and it’s nothing to cheer about.

The world hit the “sobering milestone” of 400 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 on Thursday—a first in human history—marking “a moment of symbolic significance on road of idiocy” the world has chosen, as well as a call for urgent climate action.

Reaching this level represents a global failure to address the runaway greenhouse gas emissions; as Al Gore wrote today, it shows “we are reaping the consequences of our recklessness.”

Hitting 400 ppm “symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the New York Times.

And if you’re experiencing a sense of doom that we’ve reached a level of CO2 the Earth hasn’t seen for at least three million years, you’re not alone.

At the Guardian, George Monbiot slams the 400 ppm mark as “a moment of symbolic significance on road of idiocy.” He writes:

The problem is simply stated: the power of the fossil fuel companies is too great. Among those who seek and obtain high office are people characterised by a complete absence of empathy or scruples, who will take money or instructions from any corporation or billionaire who offers them, and then defend those interests against the current and future prospects of humanity.

This new climate milestone reflects a profound failure of politics, in whichdemocracy has quietly been supplanted by plutocracy. Without a widespread reform of campaign finance, lobbying and influence-peddling and the systematic corruption they promote, our chances of preventing climate breakdown are close to zero.

So here stands our political class at a waystation along the road of idiocy, apparently determined only to complete the journey.

Climate change movement 350.org, which has campaigned around 350 ppm being the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2, created a website to reflect on what this alarming new milestone means, and how we can move forward.

On the site, Payal Parekh, coordinator for Global Power Shift, calls “Crossing the 400 ppm threshold […] a somber reminder that we haven’t taken the action we need. Nevertheless there is good reason for hope—activists all across the globe are fighting the fossil fuel industry and demanding clean, just and affordable solutions to our energy needs.”

Also urging climate action is 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, who writes that “The only question now is whether the relentless rise in carbon can be matched by a relentless rise in the activism necessary to stop it.”

If we don’t get off this fast-moving greenhouse gas train, Scripps geochemist Ralph Keeling warned weeks ago, we’re on track to “hit 450 ppm within a few decades.”

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

“Climate change is the most pressing and threatening issue to modern-day society. Through lack of understanding from generations before us, we are having to fix it. And how can we do this without education?”

15 year old Esha Marhawa from West London wrote a petition to keep climate change in the national curriculum for children in England. She’s outraged that the newly proposed curriculum vastly scales back on teaching climate change.

“Geography… inspired me enough to realise that not only is the earth a beautiful place, but one that is in desperate need of our help. More importantly, it inspired me to get out there and do as much as I could.”

Her petition on the website change.org gets more signatures every hour. You can Sign the petition even if you don’t live in London or go to Hogwarts.

What are our standards for teaching climate change science in the U.S.A., anyway?

…Anybody? …Anybody?

In December, I offered my climate change slideshow to a 7th grade Science class. They were just wrapping up their unit on Climate, so the timing was Perfect. I started by asking students a rhetorical question, “Who here knows about climate change?” 3 hands went up out of 27 students.”Do you know about greenhouse gasses?” 2 hands went up. The teacher smiled politely. And that’s when it hit me.

It turns out “Climate” in our public schools is tornadoes, weather systems, earthquakes, and you know… “Climate.” “Change” is something else. I looked back at the students, my jaw on the floor.

Halfway through my talk I show a graph of today’s level of CO2. A 12 year old shot up out of his seat and shouted, “How long has this been happening? Why hasn’t anyone done anything about this?”

He was terrified and angry. And he was right to be. I assured him, “I’m getting to that now.” He sat down again quietly and the class listened for 45 minutes barely breathing. The end of the talk is an inspiring call to action using examples of youth leaders who are changing the world.

I asked the 7th graders to write down their immediate reaction to the new coal export terminal proposed for Cherry Point, WA. I took their written comments to the public hearing in Downtown Seattle that very night.

I shared their dismay, their horror, their sense of what is right and good in the public record. These 12-year-old kids who learned of global warming that day added their voices to the growing chorus demanding an end to the madness destroying their planet.

2,500 Washingtonians had crowded into the Convention Center to oppose the coal export terminal. The wildest, loudest cheers of the night ( in fact the only cheers permitted in the hall) shook the rafters as children spoke up courageously, with absolute moral authority, to teach us grownups what is right and good, and what is madness. You can watch the video online.

Back to Esha’s petition:

“Our government, part of the generation who bear much of the responsibility for this problem, intends to not only fail to act on climate change themselves but to obscure the truth from children and young people. It is outrageous that Michael Gove can even consider the elimination of climate change education for under-14s. We must keep climate change in the curriculum in order for young people to take on this challenge of tackling the threat posed by our changing climate.”

Meanwhile…

Here in the U.S., the fossil fuel friendly Heartland Institute “think tank” has written new science curriculum. Video: Heartland Dept of Education